Panel sees return to respect for institutions as antidote to polarization

WASHINGTON. Catholic social teaching might be an antidote to the coarsening and polarized national political discourse, but first, people will have to return to respect for essential institutions such as the church and the government.

That was one of the conclusions of a June 5 panel discussion at Georgetown University for a conference convened by the university’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life along with other organizations. The three-day conference was titled “Though Many, One: Overcoming Polarization Through Catholic Social Thought.”

Organizers said the conference was meant to be a starting point to bring about Pope Francis’ vision of the Church responding to human hurts and social challenges by living out the joy of the Gospel.

“Our politics is far less forgiving and far less fun,” said commentator and columnist Mark Shields, who moderated the evening of polite discussion. “One sign of the health of an institution is whether you’re looking for converts or for heretics. It’s a sign of weakness when you’re looking for heretics.”

“Our sense of identity has grown unfortunately political,” Cherie Harder, president of the evangelical Trinity Forum, said in agreement. “Our politics is growing increasingly apocalyptic,” and as a result, people feel “fear or contempt” for those with differing views or party affiliation.

That means opponents are not viewed merely as “the other,” but as “the enemy,” regardless of whether the divide is created through race or sexuality.

“People are really disappointed in the institutions around them,” observed Michelle Boorstein, a religion reporter for The Washington Post. “The way they are organized is completely shuffled.”

“As a result, it’s become more difficult to identify moral leadership in the culture,” she said. “Is it (NFL quarterback) Colin Kaepernick? Is it Oprah? Who are the people who are really inspiring America?”

New York Times columnist David Brooks thought the problem of growing tribalism is rooted not in politics but in “cultural sociology.”

He thinks tribal politics is the result of leaving people “naked and alone,” and cited Catholic social worker Dorothy Day’s memoir, “The Long Loneliness,” which advocates for self-sufficient religious communities, as especially popular with students he teaches in seminars at Yale University.

Catholic social teaching is “basically all we’ve got” to combat tribal politics, and that also applies to the concept of subsidiarity, which directs decision-making away from large centralized institutions such as government, Brooks added. It consists of “somehow taking success down and turning it upward.”

Terrence Johnson, a professor of theology and government at Georgetown, acknowledged that millions are “very fearful” about others who look different from themselves. During the day, “we don’t talk to each other” about those differences, making the divide even worse. “We assume that the (ecumenical) Council of Nicea is not happening right now.”

The Black Lives Matter movement, Brooks said, is “part of a truth-telling that’s not comfortable for everybody,” adding that his conversations with college students have expanded his sensitivity to the national conversation on race. He called the movement an “unfurling of moral pain in ways that are good and bad.”

“Mere truth-telling,” he pointed out, “is not incivility.”

“One of the truths we do not tell,” said Johnson, has to do with “when we look at our priorities and how we live our lives. I think people are very diverse religiously,” but have trouble expressing that “in public spaces.”

President Donald Trump didn’t come up very often in the conversation, although Harder made an oblique mention. “One thing that the Catholics have done better than the evangelicals,” she said, was “not being entirely co-opted by one divisive wing of a political party. I think that’s something that should be protected … and perhaps more vocalized.”

Brooks identified the problem as “latching onto a political figure who won’t be around forever.”

In a separate panel discussion during the same conference, John Carr, director of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought at Georgetown, asked the speakers on the panel he was moderating what they see as “the major cause or cost of polarization” in the country and how the principles of Catholic social thought could help everyone work for the common good.

“The fear of the other has poisoned our souls. ... We’ve allowed it to divide us,” said Sister Teresa Maya, who noted that as an immigrant herself, from Mexico, she brings “a migrant’s view to this conversation.”

She grew up with a deep fascination of the American idea that all people are created equal, that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are human rights that cannot be taken away. In entering religious life, she said, she was convinced Jesus held the clues to create a world where these truths would hold for all.

She still believes in this “narrative of human rights” but said it “is threatened because we live in a polarized society.”

“We stay in our bubbles, with people we know,” feeding our fears, when “we must realize we breathe the same air,” said Sister Maya, a Sister of Charity of the Incarnate Word from San Antonio and president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. “Unless you can get to know the other, it can justify the most terrible thing. … The antidote to fear is hope.”

Against this backdrop, it is “important to understand who we are, who God is, how we can relate to God,” said Los Angeles Archbishop Jose H. Gomez, vice president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Catholics are called “to become missionary disciples, to go out of our comfort (zone) and be united as a people and bring the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ to our people. Everything is based on God’s plan for humanity, for each one of us.”

In addressing current social realities, he said, U.S. Catholics can learn from the Church’s approach in Latin America. He noted that Pope Francis, being Latin American, follows this “see-judge-act” method of discernment: Seeing what current social realities are, judging them in light of the Church’s social teaching, then acting to make those realities more just.

Chicago Cardinal Blase J. Cupich also talked about fear as a major factor causing polarization, describing “merchants of fear” actively working in society today.

If you watch kids of different backgrounds playing together, you see “they are not afraid” of one another, the cardinal said. “We are taught to be afraid, and we have to own that.”

The cost of polarization, he said, “is the division we face in our nation. We are not just separated by ideas but into groups. That’s the difference between partisanship and polarization. Partisans used to be able to get things done, to reach across the aisle. But we are polarized, we have our own sources of information.”

Carr asked if Pope Francis is bringing a new kind of leadership to applying Catholic social thought to today’s realities or whether he is continuing the leadership of his predecessors.

Cardinal Cupich replied with a quote he said he has often heard that “captures the continuity”: “John Paul II told us what to do, Benedict said why we should do it, and Pope Francis says, ‘Do it.’ … Pope Francis is … really an activist pope wanting to make the Church a field hospital.”